Weekly Cloud Storage Roundup

This will be the first in a series of aggregated news and information about the rapidly evolving cloud storage market.  Got cloud storage news?  Tweet it to @cloudblog!

Microsoft Launches Windows Azure Drive – previously (and suspiciously) code-named “Xdrive,” Microsoft has pushed an NTFS-formatted virtual hard drive service into a wider CTP.  According to Windows Azure Storage Architect Brad Calder, users will be able to run applications in the cloud…

Carbonite Reaches Out to Small Business – The consumer online backup tool finally unwraps a long awaited business program, Carbonite Pro, offering backup storage at $0.50 per GB per month.  The storage pricing matches the MozyPro offer, but the Boston-based firm has upped the ante by removing per device licensing fees.

Zumodrive and HP Link Up for CloudDrive – Following the Upline debacle, HP has dipped its toe back in the cloud storage water by offering the CloudDrive service on netbooks, powered by tiny Zumodrive.  The aforementioned platform has been lauded for their unique approach to desktop integration, and the ease of use in accessing the cloud via native applications, such as iTunes.  Expect the other OEMs to quickly follow suit.  iPadDrive, anyone?

Box.net Offers Cloud-based Content Management – Along with the exposure of an online document viewer, Box.net now claims an edge over Microsoft Sharepoint.

The Astonishing Rise of Dropbox

Today San Francisco-based Dropbox announced reaching the 4 million user mark and the hiring of Adam Gross, formerly of SalesForce, as SVP Sales and Marketing.  The user milestone is remarkable considering that the company touted 3 million users in November 2009 and 2 million in September 2009.

The announcement comes despite an overall decline in traffic to Dropbox’s sites in December according to Compete (in November 2009 the company acquired dropbox.com and discontinued the use of getdropbox.com).  Interestingly, Compete reports only 2.3 million unique visitors since September; adding 2 million registrants in that time would indicate either 1) errors in Compete’s measurements, so extreme as to be toxic, 2) massive growth coming from iPhone or other peripheral sources, 3) a conversion rate so incredible it has never before been seen on the web.

Dropbox users are given 2 GB of storage for free, 50 GB for $9.95, or 100 GB for $99.95.  Both paid tiers, at $0.20 per GB per month, closely mirror the $0.15 per GBM storage cost of Amazon S3, which the company uses as its storage backend.  Loading transfer and request costs, margins for paying users are even slimmer.  Presumably the company is betting on both paid and free users using far less capacity than their plans allow or gaining economies of scale from Amazon (who drops storage pricing as much as 75% at higher tiers of storage).  Storing 2GB for 4 million users equals 8 petabytes, which would cost roughly $600K per month for storage alone.  The company previously raised $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.

More Dropbox coverage here.

Pentagon vs. CIA vs. Google

Adoption of cloud computing is reaching new heights. This week both the Pentagon and the CIA discussed their uses of cloud computing.

Both are using their own, private clouds, but these security-conscious entities are embracing the paradigm.

Is Amazon’s EC2 generating $220M per year?

The analysis leaves a lot to be desired, but the conclusions of CloudScaling’s Randy Bias cannot be ignored. And while simple, the math is grounded in reasonable assumptions and backed by independent sources.

His figure puts AWS revenue for EC2 alone at almost $220 million annually. This is real revenue. And we think he estimate for S3 revenues is way low – the bandwidth costs alone are enormous. There are some interesting points raised in the comments. Care to raise any here?

Are large file transfer services cloud storage?

This is a theoretical question with practical business implications, but we’ve received some request from third parties to include firms that specialize in large file transfer in our directory so we’re curious…

Your responses are going to help us out – thanks in advance.

NBC (Network Backup Corp) Brings Cloud Backup Patent Suit

Leading cloud backup providers AllMyData, Carbonite, EMC (DBA Decho and Mozy), Iron Mountain, Officeware (DBA FilesAnywhere.com), Pro Softnet (DBA iBackup and iDrive) are being sued in a patent case filed Wednesday in the Eastern Texas District Court.  The plaintiff, Network Backup Corp (NBC) is alleging infringment of US Patent 5,133,065 and seeking compensatory damages.  Although little is known about NBC, the report indicates that the company acquired the intellectual property from Personal Computer Peripherals Corp subsequent to the patent’s issuance on July 21, 1992.  The claims were drafted and the application was filed on July 27, 1989.

A preliminary review reveals a broad and generic patent regarding network based backup.  The brief, 11-page claim identifies issues with prevailing backup systems such as “workstations [with] a only floppy disk drive on which a backup could be made” in the abstract.  It was not immediately apparent if the patent had previously been successfully defended.

Also named as defendants in the suit are Best Buy (presumably with respect to the Geek Squad Online Backup product) and Webroot, who offers services via a partnership with SOS Online Backup.

Reproduced from the Southeast Texas Record here.

Network Backup Corp. vs. AllMyData Inc. et al

Plaintiff Network Backup Corp. (NBC) is a Texas corporation with its principal place of business in Longview.

According to the complaint, U.S. Patent No. 5,133,065 was issued July 21, 1992, for a Backup Computer Program for Networks to Edward L. Cheffetz and Ronald C. Searls. At its issuance, the ‘065 Patent was assigned to Personal Computer Peripherals Corp. and is currently assigned to plaintiff NBC.

Network Backup Corp. is only asserting claims 6-10, the method claims, and not the system claims of the ‘065 Patent in this complaint.

The plaintiff alleges that defendants AllMyData, Best Buy, Carbonite, EMC Corp., Iron Mountain, Netmass, Officeware doing business as FilesAnywhere.com, Pro Softnet and Webroot Software are infringing one or more of the method claims of the ‘065 Patent.

The defendants infringe the method by their paid online backup subscription services.

“Each of the Defendants has committed acts of infringement which have caused damage to NBC (Network Backup Corp.),” the suit states.

The plaintiff is seeking compensatory damages, interest, costs and other relief deemed just and proper.

S. Calvin Capshaw of Capshaw DeRieux LLP in Longview and attorneys from Parker, Bunt & Ainsworth PC in Tyler are representing the plaintiff. Attorneys from Vanek, Vickers & Masini PC and The Law Offices of Eugene M. Cummings PC in Chicago are of counsel.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge T. John Ward.

Case No. 2:09-cv-249-TJW

The Petabyte Challenge…

Managing large amounts of data is very challenging technical endeavor, but for many cloud storage providers the volume of data they are tasked with protecting and maintaining is so large that it presents unique challenges.

One of those particularly daunting issues is “silent data corruption.” This topic is discussed by Zetta CTO Jeff Whitehead in a recent blog entry. Whitehead’s excellent description of the problem and how to analyze it includes a calculator to help estimate the probability of random disk failures – this should be required reading for any system administrator or architect of a cloud storage solution. If you’ve built one and this is news to you – you (and your customers) are in trouble…

We included a large excerpt below (Jeff: let us know if you would prefer we take it down):

IT professionals are well aware of many challenges related to scaling storage: capital required to house data, manage backups, data center space, power and cooling. One area many IT professionals haven’t had time to look at, however, is how increasing data footprints translate into increased risk of data loss or data corruption. To put this in context, IDC recently reported that data volumes will increase by a “factor of almost five,” while “total IT budgets worldwide will only grow by a factor of 1.2 and IT staff by a factor of 1.1.” In this context of constraints, being asked to do more with less, without special attention to data risk management, risk inevitably increases.

I believe that many IT professionals and CIO’s will be very surprised to see that while Data Loss (ie, simultaneous drive failures) may not be very probable, Data Corruption (the data on disk is no longer what was originally written out by the application) is shockingly likely, and has caused outages for even some of the most technologically advanced high end environments.

The objective of this blog is to introduce or reintroduce the concept of “Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL),” whereby IT professionals, CIOs, and risk managers can create a probabilistic model for evaluating the reliability and probability of data loss for your current environment, and also compare and contrast with how Zetta is advancing the state of the art for cost effective data protection.

MTTDL is a tool, and to be effective one must understand its limitations. The inputs to the model are as follows:

The number of hard drives (data set size/system performance)
The reliability of each hard drive
The probability of reading a given hard drive correctly without error (see prior blog about silent data corruption)
The redundancy encoding of the system
The rebuild rate.
Mean Time to Data Loss is in many respects a best case scenario, because it ignores risks to data integrity such as fire, natural disaster, human error, and other common causes of storage failures. It also ignores autocorrelation¸ or drives failing at the same time due to similar workload, similar manufacturing batches, firmware issues, or the like. Despite these limitations, MTTDL is still one of the better tools for evaluating the data protection features of a storage system.

Update on Carbonite Incident – More Info From CEO…

In response to our recent post regarding Carbonite’s lawsuit against its hardware vendor, we received a comment from Carbonite’s CEO David Friend. The entire comment has been approved and published, but we wanted to make sure that his key points were recognized with a full posting, as opposed to just showing up in the comments of the original.

Key Point 1: Friend notes that the incident happened over a year ago and is “not an ongoing problem.”

Key Point 2: Friend asserts that while approximately 7,500 users were originally affected by the problems, only 54 users actually lost data (and most did not lose all of their data).

Key Point 3: Friend asserts that Carbonite has change its practices and its vendors to increase the reliability of its systems such that, according to the CEO, the chances of failure “are almost nil.”

It seems like a positive indication that Carbonite’s CEO is addressing this issue head on. The questions that remain are: 1) who is ultimately responsible for the problems that occurred, 2) is the new design Carbonite is using sufficiently reliable, and 3) how will this issue affect cloud storage providers and consumers?

Carbonite Loses Data for Thousands of Customers, Sues Vendors

Online backup company Carbonite alerted the public that it had lost data belonging to over 7,500 customers over a number of separate incidents by filing a law suit against a hardware vendor and systems integrator. Carbonite claims that the cloud storage disaster was the result of $3M in faulty equipment provided by Promise Technology Inc. and has brought suit in Suffolk County. The Boston Globe reports that Promise denies any wrongdoing or liability.

Regardless of the outcome, events like this do not bode well for cloud storage providers. Failures, regardless of who is at fault, damage the critical consumer confidence that cloud storage requires to thrive. The impact of this breakdown, from a well-funded (the Globe indicated that Carbonite has raised over $46m) and well-known player in the online backup space, remains to be seen.

Thoughts? Please let us know what you think…

How does Rackspace’s Cloud Files stack up against S3?

We’re very interested in feedback on the newly launched Cloud Files services from Rackspace. The Rackers posted a very interesting blog entry that included performance analysis and cost comparisons that pits their service squarely against Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). If you are using the Cloud Files system, please post a comment and let us (and our readers) know what you think.

Shortly, we will be adding the Rackspace storage service to our directory (just gathering a little info for now)…